Armageddoning it: the best of Def Leppard

One of the best hard rock bands of the '80s

No band in the ’80s sounded bigger than Def Leppard, and that wasn’t because of their riffage; that was thanks to producer Robert John “Mutt” Lange, sprinkling his magic studio dust over them in his pre-Shania years. On their biggest album and crowning achievement, 1987’s Hysteria, they weren’t afraid to spotlight electronics while still rocking harder than most pop stars out there — or most hair metallers, with whom they were unfairly lumped, because these Sheffield blokes were always more Small Faces than Mõtley Crüe. (Think about it: you never once saw Def Lep in spandex or makeup.)

The US chart story of Hysteria, the follow-up to their massive 1983 breakthrough Pyromania never fails to fascinate me. But rather than run through it myself, I’ll let Billboard‘s Chart Beat columnist of the era Paul Grein explain it:

Not only did “Sugar” only peak at #2 — kind of shocking when you consider its ubiquity at the time — it took the album’s fifth single to finally get the Lep their #1. “Love Bites” is proof positive that hard rock ballads doesn’t have to suck. After that, they released another two singles, for a total of seven in all from Hysteria; six of those hit the top 20. All seven show up in my Def Leppard top 20, along with album track “Excitable,” and if that seems excessive to you, you likely haven’t listened to Hysteria in a while. A further six come from Pyromania, the album that showed the US how brilliantly these guys could pair pop songcraft with hard rock delivery; as Grein notes above, it peaked at #2, stopped from the top only by a little record called Thriller. It didn’t hurt matters that Def Lep embraced the burgeoning video artform, of course. MTV loved ’em.

Some other notes: A couple of these songs I have specifically in their radio/video edits. They made great albums, but they were even more a singles band, much like their glam idols Sweet and Slade were in the early ‘70s. After “Rocket,” it shouldn’t have come as a surprise that they were huge glam fans, and this borne out on their 2006 covers album YEAH! I’ve only got one track from it in my playlist, their Blondie cover “Hanging on the Telephone,” but the entire thing is well worth your time and may well surprise you. 1992’s Hysteria follow-up, Adrenalize, isn’t great, but it’s not terrible either, though they were starting to succumb to the curse of supermarket ballads. And 1999’s Euphoria featured one marvelous return to form, the #1 AOR record “Promises.” They still kill in concert, too.